Webinar on 'Industrial Heritage Part 3'

Industrial Heritage Part 3 

Speakers: Norman Redhead and Michael Nevell 

Norman [00:00] Just to make you aware that the three case studies today are all published, so you will be able to find out more about these sites if you wish. So we're going to be looking at three case studies, as I say. Two of those are in Manchester, and I will be leading on those, with Mike chipping in. So the first case study will be the archaeological excavations we undertook at the new Co-operative headquarters site of Miller Street on the side of Manchester, and that involved looking at remains of early workers' housing. Alongside that was the sites of Richard Arkwright's Shudehill Mill, so we'll be looking at the archaeology of that as well and looking at the planning out of that and the public benefits arising from those works. And then we'll be looking quickly at Murrays' Mill, a fantastic group of mills on the Rochdale Canal in Ancoats, and looking at the long-running consolidation and conversion of that very significant set of mills. And then Mike will finish off with the third case study, looking at a recent restoration scheme on the [scheduled?] remains of Worsley Delph, The Duke of Bridgewater's Canal terminus. 

So, in my previous presentation for the industrial heritage webinar, I explained the role of Greater Manchester Archaeological Advisory Service in the planning system, so I'm not going to revisit that today, but I just wanted to flag up how much pressure there is on land in Salford and Manchester city centres, as is well illustrated by this 2017 map of existing proposed developments. And this is quite out of date now. That's three years ago. You could add a lot more polygons to that map today, but it's a useful map as well in showing the location of our first two sites – A and B in the top-right corner, A being the Co-op site and B Murrays' Mill. In the centre of that image is the Duke of Bridgewater's Canal terminus in Castlefield in Manchester. So Mike's talk at the end will be travelling eight miles east of there to look at the other terminus in Worseley. 

So the Co-op HQ, which is completed now, as you can see. This is about 11 years ago. Came up in planning for a state-of-the-art new office building for the Co-operative headquarters, and it was located on a brownfield site. Many of these industrial heritage sites we've been dealing with in recent years in planning are indeed on brownfield sites, particularly car parks, where they just demolish the old buildings and put down a layer for temporary or more permanent car park. We find most of these sites have really well-preserved remains. 

So this was back in the days of planning policy statement number 5. The predecessor to GMAU – Greater Manchester Archaeology Unit – provided the planning advice at that time, and you can see it's quite a simple planning condition, but it did secure a fairly extensive programme of works. And our interest with the early workers' housing was: A, that there are none left today, so we're dealing with a vanished building type; and B, the tremendous interest by commentators in the 19th century – notable amongst them was Engels, who used to sit in Chetham's library with Karl Marx and discuss the condition of the working class – and using Manchester case studies, so this is social archaeology. We're looking at the impact of rapid industrialisation in Manchester on the people who were flocking into the town to work in the factories and living in pretty wretched conditions. But we wanted to show this archaeologically. Was Engel's overegging it, or were the conditions that bad? 

So the left-hand slide there shows a red-line boundary overlayed onto Adshead's mid-19th century map, where the Co-op HQ site was going to be built, and you can see on there the yellowy blocks of buildings are the workers' housing, and the right-hand side shows one part of the excavation, demonstrating that the remains were really well preserved. 

The first stage of the archaeological process secured by the condition was to evaluate the site to see if the remains survived well enough to be worthy of more extensive excavation. You can see the top-right slide there just how shallow some of these remains can be under car parks. That's Factory Lane, and you can see a yard area just coming off on the left, but the evaluation trenches also showed that survival was quite patchy, partly because this area was destroyed by the blitz in December 19th, 1940, so we've had extensive evidence of fragmentation of remains by bomb damage. But also, you can see, bottom-left slide, in other places remains were really well preserved and very shallow, so that allowed us to define an area of excavation. In fact, we focused on three main areas, and I'm not going to go into detail today about what was found, but you can probably appreciate from those slides that the remains were very well preserved, and we had key evidence of fireplaces, demonstrating that these cellars were lived in. And evidence on the left of there, on Angel Street, a former weaver [audio problems] 18th century subdivide. 

Hannah [07:03] We do seem to have lost Norman there, mid-presentation. 

Norman [07:04] ...the cellars to [indistinct] pack in as many workers as possible. Standard range of site, find some of these sites, except this one is nice because it's demonstrated 20th century where a lot of these finds date from, possibly in some of the cellars such as clockmakers, and bottom-right slide, we have these plaster moulds for creating metal objects. And one of the major public benefits coming from this was hosting our open day in October 2009, where we had about 1,000 people come down on a Saturday, and it was cross-generational, so there were a lot of young family members there as well, and people could really relate to the physical remains that they were looking at. 

One of the other public benefits was publication, which I'll come onto a bit later, but I'd now like to pass over to Mike just to do the first couple of slides for Arkwright's Mill, if you're there, Mike. 

Mike [08:22] OK, Norman. Yes, I'm here, Norman – not washed away by the Manchester floods or by the Manchester snowstorm, fortunately. Yes, so the location of Arkwright's Mill was actually known about from historic mapping and from contemporary 19th-century accounts, but the site itself was bombed in the Manchester blitz in December 1940 and after that was partially reused for light engineering, warehousing and then became a car park, and back in 2003, the Manchester Region Industrial Archaeology Society had a look at the car park and the site of the mill, which you can see outlined in red there, and did some initial [deskspace?] work, went out in the field and actually discovered some remains, so they're really the society, the group, who were responsible on the ground for highlighting the potential of this site. And that led to a link-up with Channel 4's Time Team in the wonderfully titled Rubble at Mill episode filmed in 2005 and broadcast in 2006, which actually acted in effect as the evaluation for the site, which demonstrated that there were deep-surviving remains relating directly to the 1780s mill and power systems. 

One of the things that Time Team and [Marias?] and Jim [A.U.?] at the time did was they brought in some volunteers and local school children. You can see in the top right-hand corner there the presenter Tony Robinson with some of the school children who we had touring the sites. It was a real community effort to locate the site, and that set the scene for later planning-led archaeology, so back to you Norman. 

Norman [10:23] Thank you, Mike. Do you want to just say something about that map on the left, Mike? 

Mike [10:32] Ah, yeah, I mentioned that we had 19th-century map evidence, but we also had some late-18th century stuff as well, so the map on the left-hand side of the screen there is the earliest detailed plan we have of Arkwright's Mill, which by that time had been handed over to his son-in-law, Simpson, hence why it's called Simpson's factory, and we've highlighted on this map the complex water reservoir system that fed a water wheel that rammed the first generation of textile mill machinery in the mill itself, although there was an experiment by Arkwright in steam-powered cotton spinning as well, so that's our first detailed view of the mill, and that certainly helped to inform the later planning-led archaeology. OK, Norman. 

Norman [11:28] Thank you, Mike. So you can see on the right slide there the development proposal, and the building in white at the top of there is actually the HQ site for the Co-op, so you can see this on adjacent land, slightly higher up. Miller Street is the road at the bottom of that complex. So in 2014, NOMA regeneration came forward with one of the largest regeneration projects outside of London, which involved three blocks of buildings on this site, which would basically take out most of the site of Arkwright's mill, and at the end of that year, they came forward with this planning application [move?], as you can see, extensive residential purposes for these new developments. Before that application could be consented and conditions attached, we had the issue of clearly very significant industrial heritage remains, which weren't fully understood and were going to be severely compromised by the development proposal. 

And based on Marias’s and the Time Team work previously, clearly these had the potential to be of national importance and schedulable, so we invoked at that time policy 139 from the National Planning Policy Framework for 2012. Now, of course that is footnote 63 in the 2019 edition, and this says that non-designated heritage assets of archaeological interest, which are demonstrably of the equivalent significance of schedule monuments, should be considered subject to the policies for designated heritage assets. 

So we set about through liaison between Manchester City Council, the developers, Historic England, GMAS and Oxford Archaeology North, who were undertaking the investigations, set about doing more detailed historic assessment work and a strict map and record across much of the site, just to get a proper understanding of its extent and relative significance and survival of the components of the site. And we then measured those against annex 1 criteria from the guide for scheduling monuments, which we use a lot in our planning work for understanding the relative significance of archaeological remains. 

And that was really quite a useful process because it established that the mill had burnt down – 19th century – and had been replaced by [Texel?] warehouse. The work established the surviving remains of the wheel pit, which was actually internal in the mill, and the adjacent gearing housing and significant remains of a multi-phase engine house attached to the outside of the mill opposite the wheel pit, so we had the remains there, but it was felt that because the spinning block of the mill had not survived so well archaeologically, and the pressures of that particular development, the public benefit would better served by allowing full excavation of the site and proper interpretation of the results. So most of the archaeology has been removed by development, with just the lower parts of the site, remains, surviving. 

So based on that information Historic England or [indistinct] decided that it shouldn't be scheduled and should be delt with through the planning system, so GMAS accordingly wrote a couple of conditions, this one for the programme of archaeological investigation, and you can see it involved full excavation of the engine house and boiler houses from the site, and that allowed interpretation of the different phases of [indistinct] able to pick out here the site of the 1793 engine house and boilers, and it allowed-- Here you can see the drone footage of the-- into two parts, the mill block and then the engine house offered completed excavations. 

The second condition, and that first condition, by the way, included dissemination of the results, both a popular booklet and an academic monograph, the first of which has been published. The second one is in the hands and will be coming forward this year. But the other aspect of this site was to try and present and interpret the results of those investigations, and there was a dedicated condition for that, and what was required through that condition was an agreed interpretation put together by Deloitte, acting for the developer, including a package of physical presentation with interactive elements, dedicated website material, including education material for schools and the publications I mentioned. So one of the key finds was this bevel gear from the 1792/3 steam engine, and that was used as a key feature of the root ways and interpretation package – physical interpretation package – on site. The other idea was to have nodes where visitors can look through using these eye pieces to see videos of people working in the mills and get a sense of what it was like to work in the mills. 

So sadly, this isn't open to the public yet because it's been delayed by coronavirus, but this is part of the interpretation package on site. The edges of the mill buildings have been subtly marked out in the hard standing as well, and there will be a website, shudehillmill.com, which isn't live yet either. It gives you an idea of how the package works. And this is the popular publication that came out from this suite of archaeological works, and as I say, there's a monograph to come shortly. 

So moving on to the second case study, this fantastic suite of nationally important mills, reflecting Manchester's rapid rise to domination of the historic textile industry. Murrays' Mill, which is the central mill in that photograph is shown here in the 1980s in very dilapidated condition, and you can see the Rochdale Canal is not in use either. In the wall alongside the canal, you can see some shoring. That's the entrance of a canal arm into the canal basin within the mill courtyard. 

So, it's one of our earliest surviving mills in the country, and the important thing is that it was owned by the same firm, Adam and George Murray starting it off for 150 years, so you could see the full range of developments, of textile machinery and steam plants over that time. But we almost lost it. One ring was burned down in the 1990s, and it was very much a partnership between English Heritage and Arkwright’s Building Preservation Trust and Manchester City Council that led to this building being saved and grant-aided to secure its future. 

And these are long-running projects. There are no quick fixes for these complex buildings. You can see Murrays' Mill in the centre of that aerial photograph from the Textile Mill Survey from the late 1980s. Twelve million pounds was raised from Heritage Lottery Fund, North West Development Agency and the city council and other agencies to basically consolidate the mill and secure its future by creating a safe shell. That led, ultimately, to the conversation into apartments. There was a considerable lull, which was a worry, brought on by the recession, so there was well over ten years between finishing that consolidation work to create the safe shell and then converting the site. 

So Oxford Archaeology North led excavations and historic building survey work through the process and produced an exemplary industrial archaeology book, or industrial heritage book, called A and G Murray and the Cotton Mills of Ancoats. I recommend you get hold of a copy and read that, and it's not just focused on the mill. It's the context around it of the Ancoats area and other mills. Just some slides to illustrate on the left, before and after consolidation works, and you can see the exposure of the canal arm I mentioned and the re-excavation of the canal boats and some of the demolished power features, including this former boiler house.  

So, Manchester life with the developers that recently took on converting the shell into residential apartments, and that was closely monitored by Paul Mason, conservation officer at Manchester city centre, and there was an archaeological watching brief, led by Salford archaeology to record any previously hidden features and monitor the development as it went on. That was secured by another condition recommended by GMAS. And marketing dream this, 'Cut from a different cloth', an enviable opportunity to earn a piece of Manchester's industrial revolution, and the people of Manchester and new people coming to the city really jump at the chance to own something that's unique. It's not just another apartment box. This is something where you've got all the history. You've got unique features in the apartment, and these apartments have sold really well. The engine house you can see in the middle of that picture has just gone on the market as a two-bedroom, three-storey townhouse for 875,000. At the low end of the scale, you can buy a one-bedroom apartment for about 200,000. 

Just a quick look. This is towards completion of the apartments, and you can see the idea is to be proud about the industrial heritage to expose the old beams and the cast-iron columns and brick fabric, lime shaft boxes, things like that. So people feel they really are in unique apartment. It also included cuttings from balconies or terraces into the roof line. And finally on Murray's Mill, what is the public benefit arising from these works? Well, some of the historic features have been preserved and presented within the new development, and there's some interpretation on site. The top-right picture shows the very earliest engine house, the remains of that, which have been preserved in one of the walls. 

But there's been a bit of give and take. Sadly, the canal basin was filled in again, although the edging of the basin is still visible, and you can see that just in front of the engine house on the left-hand slide. Because this courtyard, it's a gated community and the courtyard wasn't enough space without filling in the basin for the benefit of the many residents that occupy these apartments. There's also the front of a canal barge represented at the bottom of that photograph just to reflect on the history of the site. 

But different sort of public benefits for this development. Of course, the main one is saving the building and successfully repurposing it, making it part of-- improve economic social environmental conditions of Ancoats, which is now a vibrant area with businesses and cafés and residential accommodation, so it's helped transform that area. And of course, by this sympathetic conversion, it creates a better and unique place to work and live, which provides a sense of place in history, which the residents and visitors appreciate, and I think Mancunians are quite drawn to these sort of developments. They feel a lot of history, a lot of pride in that history as well, which is unique to Manchester. That's me done, Mike, I think, so I'm going to pass you over to finish off. 

Mike [26:24] OK. Thanks, Norman. This is the third of our case studies, and in this case, we're looking at a linear transport industrial monument, which went through six years of conservation and restoration work, opening it up to the public. So this is Worsley Delph, which is in Salford, other side of the river Mersey from Manchester, so we're still in north west England, and this is the beginning of the Bridgewater Canal. The Bridgewater Canal is one of the iconic monuments of the Industrial Revolution. It's the first long-distance industrial canal. It's not the world's first canal. It's not even the first industrial canal, but it's the first long-distance one, and it had real impact both in Britain and abroad because it demonstrated the financial viability of long-distance industrial canals. Financed by the local landowner, Duke of Bridgewater, and built with his estate manager's input, John Gilbert, and of course the water engineer James Brindley. 

But this is actually to service the coal mines at the Worsley Delph end, so the canal actually comes out of the need to access the coal, drain the mine and get the coal to the nearby towns of Salford and Manchester, and it was actually a tourist site from the 1760s onward. People would come down to the Delph. The Delph is a local dialect word for a quarry, and the quarry provided the access into the mines, so the canals went into the quarry face, and there was over 80 kilometres of underground mines. The local city council Salford came into possession of this end of the canal in the mid-20th century, and in the 1970s there was a programme of restoration work, but by the early 21st century, that then became very tired, so the Salford City Council were looking to raise grant [monies?] from heritage [indistinct] in the UK in order to provide better interpretation and understanding for the public of this national and international important monument and also to secure its long-term future. Its importance is recognised by the fact that it's a scheduled ancient monument. 

So the Greater Manchester Archaeological Advisory Service provided the planning condition, the archaeological wording to frame the archaeological works necessary to inform the conservation programme, and that involved revisiting some of the 1970s conservation work, including the two sluices, which control the water going into and out of the two tunnels into the rock face, which you can see in that upper slide. So there was a long series of evaluations and recording around the monument from 2013 up to 2018 because this is part of a larger project working with the owners of the Bridgewater canal, which is in private ownership. It's owned by The Peel Group, and they were doing some progressive restoration work throughout the stretch of the canal through Salford, so that meant that the Worsley Delph end was the final phase of that work.  

That allowed the project to evolve and change as the quality of the archaeology and the potential for access was assessed, so for instance, this happens to be the mid-18th turn pipe bridge that runs across the southern end of Worsley Delph. That was analysed and recorded in some detail in the mid-2010s. There was an early suggestion that the rooms in here might be used and opened to the public as a heritage centre or with information boards, but that proved impractical, but the archaeology that was undertaken did demonstrate that this was part of the management system for bringing in the mine boats into the Worsley Delph and taking them out again. You have to bear in mind that by 1840, there's 100,000 tons of coal each year coming out of the Worsley Delph onto the canal, which works out at several dozen pumps, three dozen boats going into the mines each day and coming out. So management is a key feature. 

By the time we get to 2018, the final phase of the project for restoring the Delph, the negotiations have been held with the mine authority, who were reluctant to allow the public into the Delph because of the risk of explosion from gases seeping from the mine, so again another way had to be found to bring the public in so that they could understand the site. So the proposal that came along was that a viewing platform would be built on the eastern side of the Delph, so that involved rebuilding a wall that had already been rebuilt in the first conservation work in the 1970s, so partially rebuilt. In the process of doing that, some major archaeology was uncovered, including on this slide here. You can see some previously unrecorded early 19th century road tunnel leading down to a previously unrecorded quay for tying up boats on this side of the Delph. 

Now, we worked with some local historians on this – Judith Atkinson and John Aldridge – who were involved in the 1970s restoration and have done a lot of work on recording sites in this part of Worsley Delph, and they were aware that there was a corn mill, an estate corn mill, behind the Delph on the eastern side. It looks like this road tunnel is actually accessed to that corn mill. 

So we have an archaeological watching brief, which was undertaken by Salford Archaeology during the restoration works, which involved dredging and clearing out the mud in the Delph itself. In the process of doing that, not just one but two quays for tying up boats were recorded, the [indistinct] were located, and also some winch machinery, which you can see in the top right-hand side of this particular picture. And when we went back and looking at the original contemporary records for the Delph, it was very clear that both the tunnel and the quays must've been added round about 1800, so there's a view here on the right-hand side from 1807 which shows the major quay on the left, which I've arrowed, which hints that it was there at that date. 

But there's very little documentary material for these new elements of the site, which, of course, is one of the reasons why we were keeping an archaeological eye on this restoration process, and you can see down here, which I've arrowed, the second quay, which is on the normal side of the bridge during restoration work in 2019. And you can also see in the main part of this image, that's the building of the public access platform the tunnel unfortunately couldn't be put on display, but it was made safe and secure, so perhaps in future generations that might be made available to the public. And we also took the opportunity during restoration work on the canal south of the bridge, linking it to the Worsley basin, to record elements of boats coming out of the canal during the dredging. 

So you can see elements of the boats here that were uncovered as part of that work, so there was an archaeologist on site all the time. And then back in the Delph itself, we recorded the site of the two sluices going into the western and eastern [coal?] entrances, and we also recorded the island in between. That island is a product of the quarrying of sandstone from this area. This actually was part of Worsley Brook, and Worsley Brook was diverted in the 1760s by James Brindley in order to allow the Bridgewater Canal to enter the underground mines at this point, and a lot of the stone from the Delph was actually quarried and used to build the Bridgewater Canal going to Manchester and ultimately its extension onto Runcorn, which was opened in 1773. 

Working with the local historians John Aldridge and Judith Atkinson, we were able to come up with some suggested arrangements for how the Delph worked and how some of the quay new features, the two quays for tying up the boats and the newly discovered tunnel, how they related to the buildings in the 18th and 19th century, which you can see on this slide here, and John and Judith have since produced a short booklet outlining the historic background to these new discoveries. And the whole thing was open to the public at the end of 2018 and early in 2019, and that involved some public interpretation, so you've got representations of canal boats here on the right. They're meant to be empty, and on the left they're meant to be full of coal, coming out of the western entrance. And you've also got in the middle something that looks a bit like a bobbin, but actually that's a sculptural representation of a jib crane, which we know was used in the 1760s and 1770s to manoeuvre the cut blocks of sandstone into boats as part of the construction of the canal. 

And the public realm works, the public information works, well, you can see those here. We've got two tiers of platform that takes you right down into the Delph. The eastern boat quay has been partially exposed and renovated, and the winch that we found is put on display, and the presence of the tunnel is referenced by the three bracing arches that you can see on the lower platform. And there are information boards and also, we've got steel plaques, which are very tactile as well, and hopefully, we'll have some duration, some length in terms of how long it might survive on this side.  

The whole of the Delph here, as I said, is owned by the city council, and the city council are committed to maintaining the scheduled ancient monument into the future. Just like the other two case studies we've been talking about, we have two publications at the moment on this. We have a general publication on the archaeology of the Bridgewater canal, published in 2016. It was the second edition last year, which mentions some of the new work done at Worsley Delph, and then we have a booklet that's coming out next month, specifically on the archaeological work, and there's some more academic articles due to come out in the next 12 months that will place the context of the new finds in terms of the history of the Bridgewater Canal itself. 

So the public benefit of what you're seeing there is really about opening up this national and international important site to the public view and interpreting what you can see and also securing its long-term future, hopefully for the 300th anniversary of the opening of the Bridgewater Canal, which will be in 2062, so hopefully, that will keep the Delph safe down to that period. And Norman, I'm sure you would like to come back in here, just to say that some of the popular publications that we've been producing fit into a broader series, and Norman, do you want to say something about the past-revealed series? 

Norman [39:20] Certainly, Mike. Last year, the latest one came out, which was on Salford's regeneration and extensive excavations of workers' housing down Chappel Street and the Crescent. That's available online as are all 27 of the series published so far, if you followed that web link listed at the bottom of that slide. We've also put some recent blogs and talks onto that site, and I placed several dozen interpretation board images on their menu, which relate to industrial heritage, so keep an eye on that WordPress site because Mike and I are constantly adding things to it. Thank you. 

Mike [40:13] Do you want me to say something about this final slide, Norman, just to highlight the-- 

Norman [40:23] Yeah, [indistinct] done that one, Mike. 

Mike [40:25] Alright. Just to highlight that there's a whole series of free resources available to download over the Internet regarding industrial archaeology and industrial heritage. And on the right here, we have four guides from Historic England, which are available to download from their website, and Manchester sites happen to feature very prominently in two of those, but that's by the by, but these are excellent introductions to glass making, science for historic sites, archaeometallurgy and pottery production, really providing a great overview on the importance and methods of recording. And then on the left, there's the Council of British Archaeology's Industrial Archaeology Handbook, which has been available free to download from the CBA site during lockdown. I'm not sure if it is at the moment, but well worth having a look. So there's plenty of material out there, and there are plenty of other resources as well to drawn on when considering the importance and approaches to recording industrial archaeology and heritage. Thank you. 

Shane [41:42] Great. Well, thank you very much, Mike and Norman. I hope you all found that enjoyable and interesting. There was some excellent case studies there. Hannah, can you put up the box so people can put questions in, further questions into Mike and Norman, please? 

Hannah [41:59] I can, absolutely. You can also type these into the chat box as well, so do give us your Q&A. I had a couple of good ones going through-- 

Shane [42:09] Yeah, and I've picked up some. Shall I run through those, Hannah? Is that OK? 

Hannah [42:13] Please do, Shane. Absolutely. 

Shane [42:15] I was scribbling them down as we went through. Yeah, to Mike and Norman, a couple of the questions that are coming through. One from Ben Wallace. He's asking, 'Were you generally happy with the level of the archaeological work interpretation and public benefit at Shudehill Mill?' I think this is the sort of thing that you and I have mentioned in the past. Given the complexity of these sites, how do we interpret the machine bases? How do we understand how these buildings worked as functioning machines? And indeed, how do they impact on the social spaces and the people who work there? 

Norman [42:56] Shall I go, Mike, on that one? 

Mike [42:57] Yeah, you take that one, Norman. 

Norman [43:01] From my perspective, the archaeological work was excellent, and we knew so much more about that site at the end of the process, and of course, that's getting out there into the public domain in really interesting ways. The downside was that that development came forward without prior consultation with ourselves, so it was almost a done deal in terms of the footprints of those new buildings. So that put the heritage under a lot of pressure, rather than starting off talking to us and seeing if we can preserve it in situ by managing the layout of the buildings, and the pressure was that the archaeology was a showstopper on that site. If we were to preserve the full mill site, it would've ruined that development, so there was considerable pressure, and I found that in other cases on brownfield sites in city centres in Manchester particularly, where unquestionable we have faced significant remains, but there such sensitive development sites that for economic regeneration purposed, the archaeology tends to be removed but well recorded beforehand. 

The same happened with the glass industry, and one of our challenges as archaeologists is that until you actually dig these sites fully, you don't understand them properly, so for instance, the Time Team, because they were limited for three days at Arkwright's Mill, they established that there were significant remains surviving there, but that wasn't long enough to understand the complexities of the site or [where?] the wheel pit was. So it's a chick and an egg situation. You almost need to dig these complex sites fully to actually understand their significance properly, so often for these industrial heritage sites, it's left to the planning archaeologist to deal with them through the planning system because there isn't enough information there to schedule them. 

Shane [45:17] I suppose with that, Norman, it also highlights the need to get in there as early as one can to look at that assessment and investigation to inform the future development and also to try to ensure that any follow-on work is undertaken to the best possible standards. But as you say, it enhances our understanding and then feeds into things like research frameworks as well in going forward. 

Norman [45:40] Yeah, yeah. Another issue for me, Shane, is that sometimes the developers aren't prepared to put money into that early evaluation because they may not even own the site... 

Shane [45:51] Sure. 

Norman [45:51] ...and certainly won't have the finance in place to do extensive investigations before submitting an application. There's a question for you, Mike, the top one about Worsley Delph and the recording there. 

Mike [46:05] Yes, we made extensive use of 3D laser scanning and actually have-- Salford Archaeology generated a model of the Delph that you could fly through and around in, and that included the new tunnel that was discovered on the eastern side. And in the process of doing that, we discovered you could actually look at the way in which the walls of the quarry had been worked, and there were quite clearly some structures built against that at some stage. So there were some major new discoveries made by the way in which we were able to use both laser scanning, and we also used drone footage from the Delph as well in order to enhance that recording in addition to the more tried and tested means of having an archaeologist on site during the dredging of the Delph and guiding the building work and making sure that bits and pieces of boats that were recovered during that dredging were properly recorded and preserved as part of that process. 

Shane [47:17] Great. Another question in the chat, probably one for Norman, was from Abigail, and she was asking how with the public realm and public interpretation at Shudehill Mill, Norman, how do we ensure that that's maintained in the long term, because obviously it's been already installed now, but 10/15/20 years down the line? 

Norman [47:42] Yes, I saw that question. It's difficult to do that through a condition because often the finance of these developments depends on discharging conditions, and they certainly wouldn't want one hanging around for ten years or so. My experiences at many of these new developments coming forward in Manchester and Salford city centres are targeted at owner occupiers, which gives a much more stable investment as properties going forward and maintenance to the public realm would be part of the service charge that the residents pay each year, so I think those are the best schemes in terms of preserving the heritage in the future, maintaining it properly. 

Shane [48:42] Great. And we've got a couple of questions on the screen now – one about the role of archaeological [constraint?] areas and also the [schedulable?] quality of the mill. Do you want to have a look at those, Norman? 

Norman [49:01] Archaeological constraint areas? No, we don't actually. Obviously, if you've got a conservation area, there's more control there, and that would lead to earlier negotiation. But we've not gone down the route of constraint areas in Greater Manchester. And the scheduling question, well, that's a good question, but the development was already quite well advanced in planning and finance packages, so I think [indistinct] would've had to go back to the drawing board. But the remains were felt from the evaluation to be significant but not schedulable, and that [part?] of scheduling for these city centre sites is balancing against the economic impact and the benefits of allowing developments to go ahead. And there's another good case study, which I did think about today but didn't use, is Ordsall Chord, with the new railway bridge across the river, which involved the loss of three listed railway bridges, and there's quite a debate there, and of course it went to planning inquiry whether the grade 1-listed structures there and the impact of the scheme on those, the balance of that against preserving the public benefit of allowing the new railway link, the inspector came down in favour of that against the benefit of preserving the listed structures. 

Shane [51:01] You know, I think Ben's also commented on the potential of archaeological constraint areas in the chat as well, so there's a follow-on answer there. One final question I picked up in the chat as well is how easily-- did you find it easy to obtain grants for some of these schemes, particularly of those from the National Lottery Heritage fund? That's from Emily. 

Mike [51:26] Oh, gosh. 

Norman [51:27] Do you want to-- 

Mike [51:29] I'll take that one, Norman. It's actually quite difficult to add National Heritage Lottery grant funding to development sites. I suppose the point about Worsley Delph was that as it was a conservation project that wasn't part of any bigger scheme of planning redevelopment, National Heritage Lottery funding was the major scheme for funding that, and because of the rules and regulations around that, quite rightly, there was a very large public element and public-facing element of that. City centre sites, not Manchester's and Salford by no means are unique in this, but city centre sites with lots of industrial archaeology above and below ground, it is very difficult to get Heritage Lottery-funded money, particularly from below ground material. 

It's slightly easier for above-ground standing buildings, where you can build that into a conversion of restoration proposal, especially if those buildings already have some protection as listed structures, but below-ground stuff are finding Heritage Lottery monies for that in the planning process is very, very difficult. There are one or two examples in the city centre, Manchester, where we did Heritage Lottery-funded work, or work funded by [indistinct] council actually, on sites which weren't under immediate redevelopment threat but have since been done, but they are very much the exception. I don't know if you want to add anything to that, Norman. 

Norman [53:23] No, that's pretty well covered, Mike. 

Shane [53:26] Great, well, I think we'll draw this to an end now. Thanks very much for Mike Norman--